Rushing the process to make more progress

Confession time! Last week, I caught myself skim reading through the Codecademy articles from the pro course I'm working on, in an attempt to get through more of the course. Urgh. I wanted to tick things off because I simply wanted to get things done as quickly as possible.

The problem with this logic is that you can say, okay great, I've gone from (for example) 19% of the course to now 26% - I've gotten through so much! But in reality, because you didn't take time to read through things properly, practice, break things and keep learning, you're doing yourself a disservice more than anything (bummer, I know).

So now what? What do you do when all you want to do is learn something super quick to prepare for job applications, a project you're working on or whatever reason you've given yourself.

• Recognize that this is a marathon and not a sprint. It’s not about getting things done as quickly as possible, but instead it’s about practicing, being kind to yourself, and actually trying to understand what you’re learning – this takes time. Check out this weekly study template by Simplex Code

I’m reading Atomic Habits by James Clear and came across this great quote:

“We often expect progress to be linear. At the very least, we hope it will come quickly. In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later that we realize the true value of the previous work we have done. This can result in a “valley of disappointment” where people feel discouraged after putting in weeks or months of hard work without experiencing any results. However, this work was not wasted. It was simply being stored. It is not until much later that the full value of previous efforts is revealed.”

• Understand that you’re not going to get (some) things straight away. Sounds obvious right? But it’s so easy to become impatient when you so eagerly want everything to just click – but this just isn’t always going to be the case! So be patient (and kind to yourself) with how long it takes to learn new concepts, no one becomes an expert developer overnight so it’s totally fine if it takes a while to get your head around certain things.
  
• Switch up what resources you’re using. There are such an abundance of free resources out there – go use them! I found that when I was rushing through the exercises on Codecademy, I decided to watch some YouTube videos on the topic, took some notes and set aside some time to experiment with what I just learnt.
  
• BREATHE. Be mindful of your breath and do your best to clear your head. Okay, definitely easier said than done! As an overthinker (and over-feeler) as Mayuko once said, this is a tricky one but definitely still super important. When you’re overthinking about all the things you need to learn (which is why you’re rushing in the first place), it can lead you to feeling super overwhelmed and not exactly in the right headspace to grasp a challenging new concept. When you find yourself doing this, try and do a short breathing exercise and see how you feel afterwards! Here’s a good one by Wim Hof
  
• If you have a mentor – reach out to them! I’m fortunate enough to be have taken a number of mentorship schemes such as Black Valley, Coding Black Females x The Guardian Mentorship, the Bank of America FinTech Mentoring and even some people I’ve reached out to on LinkedIn!

Thank you to Code First Girls for the feature!